Shape-shifters Richard Lemm and Anna Marie Sewell live in conversation
PEI author Richard Lemm and Alberta author Anna Marie Sewell will host a Facebook Live conversation on the Winter's Tales FB page about the roles of shape-shifters on March 19 at 4:00 pm (AST)/1:00 pm (MST).
The authors will discuss the roles of shape-shifters in Indigenous cultures and the ways anyone might shape-shift to confront life challenges and societal crises, a metamorphosis for personal and societal transformation. The scaffolding for the conversation will be Sewell’s Indigenous crime novel, Human(e), and the forthcoming sequel, Urbane, and Lemm’s memoir, Imagined Truths: Myths from a Draft-Dodging Poet. The focus will range from mythic shape-shifters, to the cultural shape-shifting of immigrants and other minority groups and their oppressors, to other kinds of shape-shifting which participants may bring to the conversation. Audience participation is invited.
Sewell was born in New Brunswick and moved to northern Alberta at age six. Of Mi’kmaq, Anishinaabe, and Polish heritage, she has served as Edmonton’s Poet Laureate and Writer-in-Residence at Grant MacEwan University. Her practice includes poetry, fiction, song, theatre, interactive exhibitions, community arts, and collaborative projects. Her poetry collections are Fifth World Drum and For the Changing Moon: Poems and Songs. A cultural educator, she was co-recipient of the 2022 Principal’s Award for Curriculum Design at Queen’s University. She has toured widely as a poet, in Indigenous theatre, and, most recently, as a novelist at the Frankfurt and London Book Fairs. She is a “defiantly mixed-race” shape-shifter.
Born in Seattle, Lemm moved to Canada in 1968 and has been a professor of creative writing and Canadian, postcolonial, and environmental literature since 1988 at the University of Prince Edward Island. Before that, he was a resident instructor and head of poetry with the creative writing program at The Banff Centre for the Arts. He has published six poetry volumes, a short fiction collection, and a biography of Milton Acorn, the People’s Poet of Canada. He has been a writer-in-residence in numerous places across Canada and in Tasmania and Scotland, and a visiting professor in Cairo, Egypt.
This event is co-sponsored by the faculties of Arts and Indigenous Knowledge, Education, Research, and Applied Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island.
